Social Media for Film Festivals

0. List of team members

Joonas Sairiala

Anne Määränen

Róbert Frankó

Satu Aholin

Cristina Pop-Tiron

1. Research questions

1) How does the use of web and social media differ among Film festival organisations?

2) Which social media is most frequently used and which has the most active audience?

3) How active is event organizer in different media and how are the posts constructed?  

4) Are there some signs of Community Building? What, how?

5) Does use of social media somehow affect the quality of websites and PR of the event/organisation?

2. How we did it

After our team was set we have opened a discussion document about the research questions and the goals. We have all chosen a festival we would have liked to follow and then set the questions based on our personal interests.

With that done we have finalized the questions and started working on the research based on the festivals we have targeted.

Each team member has created their own research and posted it on the drive folder we share. Keeping in touch was challenging as all team members have either ongoing projects or work and for that reason a discussion document has been created where we could easily share thoughts and discuss questions. Although it is not the most efficient way to have an interactive discussion, it has worked for us well without any occured problems.

As the reports have been finalized, the only remaining task was the final report and… well, this is where we are at.

Here's a little task: count the colour coded social media platforms mentions and see if you agree with us in our final conclusion?

3. What we found

Joonas’s picked Sci-Fi London.

Sci-fi London is by far the UK’s biggest sci-fi film festival with 14 years of supporting fantastic genre films and presenting new films through their renowned 48 -hour film challenge.

The festival  at the time of writing enjoys a hefty 8 8857 likes on Facebook on their main page and 1 247 on the 48-hour film challenge page, a following 10, 736 on Twitter and a Youtube account with 813 subscriptions and 1 975 516 overall channel views. Naturally for a film festival a YouTube account is necessary and for Sci-fi London the most recent video was posted a week ago.

https://twitter.com/scifilondon

https://www.facebook.com/SFL.48hour.film.challenge

https://www.facebook.com/scifilondon

http://www.sci-fi-london.com/

In conjunction with the above, Sci-fi London runs a website with podcasts, news, articles and general information about their events. Additionally Sci-fi London engages in a huge variety of social media through a daily virtual newspaper which displays shared articles throughout the web.

For the festival the most active social media, by 10 most recent actions, is Twitter and if we take a look at Twitter statistics that seems to be the case. The Twitter account was set up on 11th of January 2009 according to the first tweet and has so far collected 10, 736 followers, averaging 4 a day with 9,507 tweets, averaging 5 a day.

If we take a look at how different social media platforms is used, we can see that Twitter has a utility role above all else, while Facebook has a more freeform role and allows a bit more elaborate content.

                                                              

Most of the tweets are constructed in a way that is straight to the point with lots of links, clearly dedicated purely for sharing information succinctly while the Facebook posts have a more relaxed form and allow for some elaborations.  

The least active platform in terms of comments or likes seems to be Youtube, where there are virtually no comments and very few views. Youtube content is completely void of any encouragement to comment or share and is clearly there purely to host trailers and other content that is then discussed elsewhere, which is exactly what Sci-Fi London needs Youtube to be. The hosted content is linked to from Twitter, Facebook or the Sci-fi London web page.

The overall user activity across the platforms seems to be quite low, there are barely any comments or clear signs of interaction apart from the posts on the website and Facebook averaging around 3 to 4 likes per post, counting the 10 most recent. The most active in terms of comments and likes seems to be the Facebook page for the 48-hour film challenge, which is quintessential in promoting the event and serves as a fantastic community building tool, averaging a whopping 8 comments and 6 likes per post. The film challenge page effectively encourages activity due to it’s very nature, but of all the comments on Sci-fi London’s posts they have replied to only one. On Twitter the hashtag #sfl48hr, which is for the film challenge, is definitely the most active with the 20 most recent tweets from the past two days.

In conclusion we can clearly see that Sci-fi London’s use of social media is above all else consistent and serves as a useful tool for promotion and sharing information, but it it would benefit from slight encouragement to participate in commenting across the board and not just during the hype for a film challenge. Despite the lack of commenting or sharing and general user activity, social media is clearly working for Sci-Fi London exactly the way they need it to.

The website brings together a large variety of content and includes the content of the different social media platforms and presents a truly professional look which clearly drives the film festivals brand forward. Seeing only 5 likes in a post can seem underwhelming, but those 5 can matter a lot. Without access to full traffic statistics between the web page and social media platforms we should avoid making assumptions as to how likes or comments really correlate to the amount of viewers each page receives as especially when the organization in question is a genre film festival.

Anne’s research is based on the Helsinki International Film Festival

(Picture source: www.hiff.fi)

Helsinki International Film Festival, or the ”Love & Anarchy” as it’s more generally known, started late 1980’s in Helsinki as a small, local but annual film festival. Main idea of the festival is to show new trends and present contemporary, controversial and visually stunning films, many of which most likely never would otherwise be available in theatres in Finland. Over the years the festival has grown and the 27th festival will last eleven days (18.-28.9.2014). Next festival’s program is not yet ready, but usually there are more than hundred films shown in nine theatres in Helsinki city center area. Last year they even showed some films online, free of charge and with real time online discussion with other viewers and movie makers! After the festival some films are taken to a tour in other Finnish cities. (www.hiff.fi)

The festival has a somewhat active website (www.hiff.fi). Program (once published) is constantly kept up to date and any changes are clearly displayed on the website. They publish film & festival related news throughout a year and during festivals the blog (on the website) is presenting directors, films, festival organizers etc. Landing page shows current news, events and also the latest status updates / tweets from social media. Love & Anarchy can be found in both Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/helsinkifilmfestival) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/LoveAndAnarchy). They have also published some interviews and trailers in YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/rakkauttajaanarkiaa/feed). I found also few posters and pictures users have pinned to Pintrest (www.pintrest.com, use search phrases “rakkautta & anarkiaa” and “helsinki international film festival” .)

I wanted to compare if they publish the same content on all media or if social media has some other purpose and content than web. Role of social media seems to be to support information found on web and printed media. Festival is active in Facebook, constantly publishing industry news and promoting other events. Status updates normally get few likes or shares from 9477 users liking the page, but otherwise the community isn’t very active. Even sharing and liking blog updates from website is rarely used. What comes to other SoMe platforms, YouTube has only few videos and Twitter is mostly used during the festivals, which I think is quite natural for this kind of account. In Twitter festival has 1107 followers, which compared to 57 000 visitors (www.hiff.fi) isn’t much, but will probably grow in future.

The main online-media seems for now still be the website, but PR has clearly noticed the force of social media and is taking more active role at least in Facebook. Personally I hope to see more trailers and video interviews in YouTube, also.

Robert has been working on the research of BuSho Film Festival that takes place in Hungary.

“The festival was established in 2004 by a group of Hungarian filmmakers in order to fill a gap in the category of short film, but over the years it became clear that it was about much more. After the 3rd festival in 2007 shorts were screened from 45 countries. The name "BuSho" has come from a pun (Budapest Short), but it refers to a traditional popular custom of winter-send-of from Southern Hungary called "busójárás".

One of the organiser’s main goal is to develop, present and caught up the cultural identity of the Eastern European audiovisual sector helping it to give more experts to the market. They give ground to young filmmakers for they can introduce, create and together we can make a new European Value. The number of entries in fiction, animation and experimental category is gradually increasing, in 2011 there were 962 shorts to be slected by the pre-jury of which 90 can make it to the competition. Beside the competition and informational program they have plenty of festival screenings, selections of film universities, feature films, film-, and all-art workshops in the program. The festival is 100% financed by sponsors, mostly only hungariand founds, but there are international organisations such as Czech Centrum and the Austrian Cultural Forum.

The festival’s website is very basic and looks like it needs to be re-designed. The color usage, the fonts, the headers, with the overall outlook are old fashioned and not the hipster way. It is simply poor web-design. It is also available in English, however not all of the menu options available.

The news page is not frequently updated, once in a month usually with some actual news about projects and upcoming happenings. No links are included. The general outlook is messy and unorganised.

BuSho only uses Facebook as social media. As such, Facebook has a pre-made layout that is given and doesn’t give much options to modify a lot besides the cover photo and the profile picture. With such, it has a clean layout and understandable structure. However, their cover photo and logo are low resolution and doesn’t work well.

In the other hand, BuSho is surprisingly active on Facebook. They have posts and updates very often with only couple days difference. They are posting a lot of information about what is going on with the festival and also interesting projects or related videos. It is obviously more organised and taken care of. BuSho has 1054 followers, however the average number of likes and comments on post is 2.

Since the website is quite static and not much going on, Facebook should be the place to engage conversations and topics people might would be involved or interested in, but the Facebook page remains still static in this sense. There is no discussion going on, no random questions asked, nothing to keep the followers interested. This is probably the reason for the lack of interest and the low number of follower activity.

There is also no sign of community building, although the main idea of the festival is to put the focus on a somehow lacking category that would definately need more attention. People should hear about it and they should be gathered in a community with a lot of interesting discussions and forums going on, but all you get from the Facebook is just the dry facts and links that might be interesting some way. There is no headline that would trigger the conversation, neither is anything that would make the post stand out so that the people who liked it wouldn’t actually just skip and overlook it.

In the case of BuSho Facebook definitely has all the potential to build up the brand rather than destroying it. Since the web is basic and messy looking, the information that can be shared frequently on Facebook, and the possibilities that it offers in case of the usage in a correct and creative way could make the brand stronger and internationally well known. There are just so many missed opportunities such as the lack of Twitter usage where things could get started and followed on facebook. If the festival is all about short films, why not using Vine to upload fun and interesting videos that can be easily made? Why no Instagram gallery with event photos, jury images, showreel-like pics, etc…

BuSho haa a YouTube channel that contains the video material concerning the festival, but it is not advertised on the website, neither on Facebook. This is probably a reason the video views are so low. Another opportunity missed.

In conclusion: the organisers see that since they are a small festival they should use social media to reach more people. In case of such a small organisation, social media could really be the wow-factor if used creatively, but it seems like they have totally missed the point and it didn’t build the brand the way they have probably expected.

Sources:

www.busho.hu

   

https://www.facebook.com/pages/BUSHO/128756579085

Satu had chosen TIFF.

The Toronto International Film Festival is the leading public film festival in the world, screening more than 300 films from 60+ countries every September. http://tiff.net/festivals/thefestival

TIFF was founded 1976 and has since become one of the most influential film festivals in the world. “Many Hollywood studios premiere their films in Toronto due to TIFF's easy-going non-competitive nature, relatively inexpensive costs (when compared to European festivals), eager film-fluent audiences and convenient timing.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_International_Film_Festival)

Also many of the future Oscar nominees have had their first premiere in Toronto International Film Festival including winner of the best picture of 82nd Academy Awards, King’s Speech.

TIFF has an active webpage due to the fact that it is more than one film festival these days. Besides Toronto International Film Festival TIFF houses in actual five storey building, TIFF Bell Lightbox, these days a library, other festivals, screening programme, workshop for kids, film circuit network throughout Canada and own channel for industry workers. In words of CEO of TIFF, Piers Handling: “I want every film lover to feel like TIFF Bell Lightbox is theirs.”

The actual festival page does not have that much news going on during this time of year but tiff.net is active daily. Besides the homepage TIFF uses Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube. They also have Instagram account. Film Festival is using the same accounts with whole TIFF.

Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/TIFF) has almost 100 000 likes and same goes for Twitter (https://twitter.com/tiff_net) followers. While Facebook is used every other day, Twitter seems to be the main communication platform for TIFF but only to direct people to their webpage or YouTube channel. But according to statistics, TIFF gets more attention via Facebook and I think they should use more of it. Communication in Facebook is more active than in Twitter and when comparing retweets and shares or favorites and likes, Facebook is winner in both. TIFF uses YouTube also a lot compared to many other organisations. During the festival TIFF is posting a lot of videos from the press conferences or Q&As or basic film trailers that are the most watched material they have on their channel. It seems that the most active commenting is also happening in YouTube, at least when the video is popular.

Statics during last week:

Channel	Videos/Tweets/Posts	Views/Retweets/Shares	Comments	Favorites/Likes
YouTube	6	8564	2	22
Twitter	22	175	13	85
Facebook	5	75	43	445

Pinterest is mainly used only to celebrate the festival; there are boards for each year or some special artist of the industry. (http://www.pinterest.com/tiffnet/)

Facebook seems to be the only platform they are actually doing some community building, for example this contest of famous cat: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.845013712182014.1073741829.138645369485522&type=1 .

In general, posts in Facebook are more relaxed and easy-going, easy to approach, than in Twitter where they are informative and always linked to webpage or YouTube channel.

The TIFF staff also has their own Twitter accounts that are published on the webpage: http://tiff.net/explore/social

Also, hats off to TIFF, they have Weibo account as well: http://www.weibo.com/u/3469162722 Weibo is Chinese microblogging website, hybrid of Facebook and Twitter and one of the most used websites in the world. TIFF also has Vine account that allows it to post short videos to the app but the usage is rare.

In conclusion: TIFF’s use of social media is impressive and definitely reflects the quality of homepage that is easy to use and informative and nice to look at too. It’s simple and working and so is all the information that TIFF is putting out to promote anything they want to promote. And as always polite Canadians, they also have Weibo! That’s just unbelievably cool. (And this was totally unprofessional of me but I am very impressed!)

Cristina has been hard at work on the research of TIFF from Cluj-Napoca.

Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) is presented by Romanian Film Promotion. Founded in 2002, Transilvania IFF is the first international feature film festival in Romania. During these twelve years, Transilvania IFF has become a well-known brand in Romania, not only due to the outstanding films screened every year, but also for the effective organization, sparkling atmosphere and density of events, from seminars, workshops and panels to fabulous concerts and crazy all night long parties.

Transilvania IFF's 2007 edition, was the first to be presented simultaneously in Cluj and Sibiu, that year's European Capital of Culture.

The last editions of Transilvania IFF showcased an extremely generous and diverse offer of films and sensational events. The 2013 edition presented almost 400 screenings, attracting over 62.000 spectators during the ten days of the festival.

Transilvania IFF has become the place for national releases of the most important domestic productions. This is the place where Romanian audiences first got to see the films that marked the boom of Romanian film production over the past years.

Social Media has given a revolutionary road to the way film festivals promote themselves. In this case, it’s safe to say that the social networks are the main way festivals give news to the audience. Of course there are websites and sometimes Tv and radio, but in the last few years nothing had topped the social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Transilvania International Film Festival’s communication team does a great job of updating these platforms. They found the way to combine more of them, in order to reach the maximum number of audience. For example, the Twitter account promotes the Facebook posts, where sometimes Youtube and Vimeo is involved with the trailers.

The most active time for the organizers is during the festival, of course. They have thousands of views each day and the audience is active as well. Uploading photos from different events, the cast, the directors and also the staff.

The posts are short and straight to the point, very easy to follow and to be always in touch.

The online platform www.tiff.ro, constantly updated with fresh info and photo and video galleries, was accessed by 43.251 unique visitors, among which 41% are new visitors. Out of the grand total of 85.980 visits, about 10% were made from mobile phones; the most accessed pages were Program and Films. Even though the website was accessed mainly from Romania, there have been lots of online visitors from Great Britain, Germany, the United States, Hungary, France, Italy, the Netherlands or Austria. The official Facebook page of TIFF received 5000 new "Likes", which were added to a now grand total of 33.600. The number of likes for various posts went over 16.500, while certain posts gathered over 320 comments.

This kind of promotion can only affect positively the PR of the event, but while Social Networks are being more and more popular, the amount of traffic is increased, but not necessarily the quality. There are millions of photographs and videos, words from hundreds of people and this can get overwhelming. When there’s too much, people tend to think that not everything is good.

A positive influence by the social media is in the other weeks of the year, when the staff keeps everyone interested and curious with different contests and special projections. There is a cafe in Cluj, Casa TIFF ( TIFF’s house) where they organize very often either parties or movie projections. Usually the movies are from the festival, so we can see them if we didn’t had time during the festival. It’s a great atmosphere and people can realize that the organizers are really involved and love what they do.

I take this as a sign of Community Building, because there are lots of people who work very hard for this festival but not only during the festival. I noticed this online as well, because of the intense activity of the same group of people. They enjoy what they do and this reflects on the outcome.

Source:

http://tiff.ro/en

https://twitter.com/TIFFromania

https://www.facebook.com/TransilvaniaIFF

https://www.youtube.com/user/TIFFteam

4. Conclusions, suggestions

As it is clear from the researches, the bigger the event, the better social media use associates it. All film festival organisers have seen the opportunity in using some sort of social media if not more, and they are putting a huge effort on updating, and include information or some sort of engaging information that ought to trigger the fans and also the people who follows the events.

Most of the festivals are mostly active during the festival which is a general state since that is the time when people shall be cheered up and supplied by information.

It was also interesting to see that festivals such as Sci-Fi London that has quite a history and so much admirers has so low numbers of comments and likes on facebook. Clearly the content is essential just like in the case of BuSho which is a small festival and really missed the opportunity that social media offers.

When it comes to actual platforms, Facebook is by far the most effective. Eventhough some festivals use Twitter to promote links to their website or to YouTube, it can be seen that in Facebook festivals have the most communication to the audience which is the most important in community building. The great website with help of the social media can be a powerful tool to any organization. The more festivals use social media, the more they get the recognition. It is also important to see that social media platforms are most effective when used together like promoting Facebook post or YouTube videos in Twitter. Film festivals could also use more interaction like in Sci-Fi London did in 48-hour-fil-challenge.

In overall we can confirm that the use of social media is quintessential to film festivals and if done properly, carefully and taking care of the content attentively it is not only helping raising the renown of the festival’s PR, but it also keeps the followers busy and interested, in other words: keeps the flame.

The content that is shared must be high quality, no place for random sorties or posts that would undermine the outlook of the festival. And after all, that is what matters the most: fans that actually follow.